With the hockey lockout looming, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at player salaries and how they measure up with what past stars earned.

Salary data is easily available from the NHLPA (for current season) and from CapGeek.com for past seasons. Both are reliable, recognized sources.

Pre-90s salaries are harder to find. HockeyZonePlus has a list of “prehistoric salaries” which it claims was compiled form several news sources and player biographies. I fact-checked a few of those numbers, such as Maurice Richard’s $25,000 salary against some official resources, and they checked out, so I decided to use them.

Now the issue was displaying these historical salaries against the line charts of current salaries for the last decade or so. A reference line in Tableau was the ideal solution.

(I must tip my hat to Daniel Hom at Tableau whose quick and cheerful help has enhanced so many of my vizzes.)

First, I had to create a Parameter in Tableau. This is a handy advanced function that can serve as a custom filter or to change values in the viz. In this parameter, I associated a historical player name with a value from 1 to 10:

Click images to see full size.

This created this drop-down menu on my worksheet that for now does nothing:

Now I need to associate the number values given to each player in the parameter with a dollar figure (their salaries). This requires a Calculated Field:

Now I’m ready to create the reference line. I want a dotted horizontal line on the appropriate level of the Salary axis, so I right-click on the Y-axis and choose Add Reference Line. The calculated field I created is there as an option. I can customize the label to show the relevant dollar figure:

And voila. We can now see how moneyed today’s hockey stars are compared to the greats of yesterday.

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